Hacker News Reader

maxgashkovon Japan implements language proficiency requirements for certain visa applicants

Not sure why your comment is downvoted, because it hits the issue dead center, namely it's completely possible to pass either of the required tests (N2/J2) and not being able to speak a single word of Japanese in a live conversation.

That's why at least one category of applicants abusing the visa (Chinese) will continue to do so without any issues.

maxgashkovon Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

None of them are 'good'. Execs at Anthropic just perceive the long-term damage from a potential Snowden-level leak showing how their model directed a drone strike against a bunch of civilians higher than short-term loss of revenue from the DoD contracts.

maxgashkovon Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days

Thank god. The only remaining failure mode I’ve seen with LE certs recently is API key used to manipulate DNS records for the DNS-01 challenge via some provider (Cloudflare etc.) expiring or being disabled during improper user offboarding.

maxgashkovon Ukraine destroys more than 40 military aircraft in drone attack deep in Russia

According to videos published they still seem to be flying drones manually, so won't additional latency introduced by the cellular network & repeaters make this really hard / impossible?

maxgashkovon Japan Post launches 'digital address' system

Japan Post represents only a portion of shipping providers in Japan, for our idea to work others will need the same privileged access to the system: Yamato, Sagawa etc.

This will also require to alter the package label on the last mile because requiring the courier to scan every package or letter before they could even see an apartment number will slow things down to a crawl.

maxgashkovon Japan Post launches 'digital address' system

It solves an issue of Japanese addressing system being a total mess. There is basically a wild wild west when it comes to the address part on most of the ecommerce sites in Japan: some offer address auto-complete via zip code, some don't; some require a building name, some don't; and the address itself may be written down in different ways. Having a source of truth in a form of a provider which has vested interest in keeping the address uniformly correct on entry is god sent here.

maxgashkovon Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

> almost all employers will pay for employees to commute by public transport but not by car, because the government heavily incentivises them to do so

Could you clarify this? To my knowledge only 2 things that could qualify as incentive exist:

- commuting allowances are not considered taxable income for employee

- commuting allowance could be used to reduce tax base for the business

But this is not something I'd call 'heavily'.

My understanding is that commute is universally covered as this is an expected job benefit in Japan, and commuting by car is disencouraged in cities due to the increased insurance liability (as commuting time could be considered work time and injuries incurred to 3rd party will expose the company to liability as well).

maxgashkovon Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

Not only more expensive to produce and recycle, but the gates have to be extremely complex to handle paper tickets (some railway museums in Japan have them cross-cut on display!).

maxgashkovon Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

Please don't read too much into it. Outside of the peak demand at least here, in Kansai area, gates will close when they sense you approaching to indicate that you actually need to touch the card or insert a ticket. They stay open only if there is a continuous flow of passengers going one after another.

Another interesting fact is that gates' actuators are not super rigid and it's completely possible to force enter not realizing in time your card has failed (you will be approached by station attendant though).

To summarize, culture may play a role but the main differentiator is the high traffic volume.

maxgashkovon Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]

It's nowhere near the 'same form factor'. I'm taking switch to me in almost every trip and I have taken steam deck once and had regret it deeply (too bulky, too noisy, hot and barely lasts a couple of hours).

maxgashkovon The Cheapest NAS

I had a (dis)pleasure of running multiple Synology units in a business setting. They do die out on you like everything else if not more frequent, the QC is generally non-existent.

maxgashkovon A Return to Blu-ray as Streaming Value Evaporates

It never really went away. Last decade is truly a golden age marked by the *arr suite of tools, most of them are better maintained than an average streaming app.

maxgashkovon The Matrix Trashfire

Oh wow, since when there is an option to "pay up" into the Matrix ecosystem and get a solution that just works? Could you point to it?

maxgashkovon Switch off bad TV settings

Obligatory PSA to enable the setting to set correct framerate of the content from the source you're playing if you have at least 120hz-capable panel.

E.g. if you're playing 24fps movie from a device that's reporting 60fps uniformly across all content, you will have a bad time.

For Apple TV it can be set like this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102277

maxgashkovon Cloudflare is free of CAPTCHAs; Turnstile is free for everyone

You don't even need Firefox or anything privacy-oriented. These checkboxes were forever hit-or-miss for me on a Chrome with the default settings (!). My ISP is using IPoE tunneling which has a side-effect of a shared IPv4 address among bunch of households and surprise-surprise no one in Cloudflare is aware that countries beyond US exist.

At this point I'd honestly take CAPTCHA over this bullshit.

maxgashkovon Why scalpers can get tickets

It's extremely easy to get multiple virtual debit cards numbers. The only way around this is to maintain some allowlist of BIN/IINs for the known banks/services that do not have this kind of product which may severely limit conversion rates I guess.

maxgashkovon SteamOS 3.5 Delivering Some Decent Performance Gains for the Steam Deck

Even if they announce it today no way you're getting it within at least half a year given current shortages, waitlists etc.

maxgashkovon Don’t Talk to Police (2012) [video]

Regular reminder that this is strictly true for the US. For other countries YMMV by following this approach.

E.g. it's generally a bad idea to shut up completely once you're in a police station in Japan, as they may hold you up for 23 days w/o pressing charges and allowing you to communicate with the outside world.

maxgashkovon First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good

It's no more a laptop replacement than iPad is. Almost 4 years down the road after the release of iPadOS and it's still a failure as a laptop replacement save for a few well-selected niches.

And the new VisionOS (or whatever Apple will decide to call it) will have to be even more restricted than iPadOS was compared to MacOS just because of the tighter coupling to your body.

maxgashkovon Ask HN: Suggestions to host 10TB data with a monthly +100TB bandwidth

They have released this updated to their ToS recently: https://blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos/

The whole point of R2 is to remove predatory practices of egregious charging for egress, and if somehow they went back on this promise that would be a very bad PR.

maxgashkovon PayPal has restricted our account after we invoiced a key containing “ALEP”

For some markets/niches PayPal is a must due to customer trust, and they are not shy in exploiting their position to the fullest.

maxgashkovon PayPal has restricted our account after we invoiced a key containing “ALEP”

True to some extent — usually banks are not as eager to ban you without any prior notice as PayPal nowadays.

maxgashkovon PayPal has restricted our account after we invoiced a key containing “ALEP”

This is not an option for the majority of businesses now as PayPal requires mandatory funds hold which may routinely be on the order of 90 days. So even if you sweep it daily, you still have 1-3 months of your MRR sitting in flight and at risk indefinitely.

maxgashkovon Welcome to Wildebeest: The Fediverse on Cloudflare

https://github.com/cloudflare/wildebeest

Official install guide is underlining that all the Cloudflare's offerings are still a disjointed bunch. You need to enable billing in 3 separate products in 3 different UIs (while only Images requires an actual paid plan, Access requires a credit card to onboard and Workers Unbound is probably a good idea to enable right away).

Why so much management/onboarding complexity if you really want to compete with AWS as a general-purpose cloud?

(edit: spelling)

maxgashkovon Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer

> "Don't send me your details, I've fixed the problem for you and everyone else with the same issue" = green flag

While I agree with the sentiment, fixing it in this way for any org of the CF-like scale will take days or weeks (because of peer reviews, compliance etc.). Fixing it fast by adding exception in some control panel is probably fine.

What's alarming is that the escalation process didn't really change for all the time I'm using Cloudflare as a customer (8 yrs now?) and watching jgrahamc's involvement. The fact he has a bat signal trained on the HN is a major red flag.

maxgashkovon Living alone in the wild Siberian forest

I'd keep a woodpile nearby only as an emergency stock, just for the case you described (when you cannot go to the forest due to the storm or being sick).

I agree that the rest of the house has questionable design choices though.

maxgashkovon South Korea’s online security dead end

I’ve got the idea from the parent comment obviously. It’s cool that the practice of paper cards is not as widespread as I thought after reading it.

maxgashkovon South Korea’s online security dead end

btw, this paper card approach was replaced by physical hardware OTP tokens (lasting multiple years until they have to be replaced), it’s as secure as the supply chain (which is also a factor for paper cards), so I’m not sure why Korea still clings to this as tokens are obviously a net gain in ops cost

maxgashkovon Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

Update is valuable, but I'm surprised there is no word on you looking for another payment processor. I do realize it's a painful process from the integration & KYC bullshit perspectives, but I'd be looking for alternatives after experience like this.

Also, it's good that Stripe deservedly gets bad publicity for shit like this, but nothing will really change unless they start losing paying customers.

maxgashkovon John Carmack Leaves Meta

I don't have an exact number, but let me answer your question with another question — why else are the most popular VR games (Beatsaber, Alyx etc.) either completely static or move-by-teleport? My suspicion is that they were playtested _ad nauseam_ and this showed significant portion of the players to be affected.

> I can definitely feel off at 60Hz, but no problem so far at 120 if the latency is kept to a minimum.

This is a common misconception and the type of nausea I'm talking about has nothing to do with the screen update latency or head tracking latency. Strongest effect happens when you're mostly stationary in the real world (sitting or standing on the floor) but moving in VR (let's say riding a rollercoaster). In this case, your vision tells your body that you should feel acceleration/deceleration, but your inner ear tells your body you're completely stationary. This is a contradiction commonly associated with intoxication and body deals with it accordingly.

I accept that strength of the effect is different for everyone, for me personally when I tried the rollercoaster demo on Quest 1 nausea lasted for 2 hours (!) despite the fact that I was never seasick in my life before.